Kakistocracy: a word we need to revive

Either kakistocracy gets used and thoroughly examined or a Trump presidency will force us to do so.

High school students protest in opposition of Donald Trump's presidential election victory in front of City Hall in San Francisco, Nov. 10, 2016. Eric Risberg AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.

“Stupidity does not consist in being
without ideas. Such stupidity would be the sweet, blissful stupidity of
animals, molluscs and the gods. Human Stupidity consists in having lots
of ideas, but stupid ones. Stupid ideas, with banners, hymns,
loudspeakers and even tanks and flame-throwers as their instruments of
persuasion, constitute the refined and the only really terrifying form
of Stupidity.” – Henry de Montherlant, Notebooks, 1930-44

How and why did a word so relevant for our times be pushed almost to
oblivion? In a world where stupidity penetrates multiple levels of
government, policies and personalities; it is strange that the term
coined to best describe it has actually ended up in the endangered and forgotten words books. Stupidity in governance needs to be treated as a political problem, and kakistocracy can best capture this problem.

Kakistocracy is the government of a state by its most stupid,
ignorant, least qualified and unprincipled citizens in power. Kakistos
means “worst” which is superlative of kakos “bad” (perhaps also related
to “defecate”). Along with kratos (see -cracy) meaning “power, rule.”

The first documented example appeared in 1829 in a book called The
Misfortunes of Elphin, written by the English novelist and poet Thomas
Love Peacock.

They were utterly destitute of the blessings of
those “schools for all,” the house of correction, and the treadmill,
wherein the autochthonal justice of our agrestic kakistocracy now
castigates the heinous sins which were then committed with impunity, of
treading on old foot-paths, picking up dead wood, and moving on the face
of the earth within sound of the whirr of a partridge.

By 1876, the American poet James Russell Lowell was clear regarding its political implications when he wrote in a letter:

What fills me with doubt and dismay is the
degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of democracy?
Is ours a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” or
a Kakistocracy, rather for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

Yet given the prevalence of the problem it describes, the word is
strangely not appreciated and underused in the twentieth and
twenty-first century. The University of Sydney library search shows,
since 1917, a modest use of the term only to suddenly peak after 1981.
Perhaps because it corellated with the rise of neoliberalism which has
an intimate relationship with stupidity, or to put it more harshly in
the words of Mexico’s Subcomandante Marcos: “Neoliberalism is the
chaotic theory of economic chaos, the stupid exultation of social
stupidity, and the catastrophic political management of catastrophe.”

Kakistocracy as a term then tapers off only to make a modest rise around
2008, when eight years of Bush hinted the word might be of some
significance. Yet by rise, I am speaking of less than a dozen texts.
Overall, Google Scholar sees the word employed merely 204 times in the
scholarly literature. A few reasons can explain this neglect.

First, the heavyweight dictionaries have not come to a consensus on
the term – Merriam-Webster and Collins list kakistocracy, but Oxford and
Cambridge do not. Also there is little sign the term has spread from
the English language (apart from its Greek roots) and made inroads into
other languages – This could have ensured its widespread use.

Second, according to Phrontistery,
there is a staggering 169 forms of governments, including bizarelly
enough, diabolocracy (government by the devil) and pornocracy
(government by harlots). I guess it must have been an issue at some
point in time for someone to invent such terms. But it means
kakistocracy is in competition with other robust and not so robust terms
– creating an etymological dystopia.

Third, kakistocracy can be abused. It is not difficult to fathom from
historical texts that every generation seems to consider their
government as being the worst ever kakistocracy. The term is invoked to
tarnish any government one does not agree with – acting as nothing more
than a sophisticated guise for unwarranted attacks. There is even a risk
the term could become too “mainstream,” losing its meaning and impact
similar to the fate of, for example, soft power.

Finally, it is my suspicion that analysts have preferred to use
kleptocracy (rule by thieves) instead. But kleptocracy is not the same
as kakistocracy: they do both capture the element of least qualified or
the worst, but with different meanings.

Taking a reductionist stance for
the sake of making the point, Putin’s regime is more of a kleptocracy, a
regime ruled by thieves and thugs but that does not mean Putin is
politically incompetent or stupid.

Sisi’s Egypt shows elements of
kakistocracy where stupidity is clearly characteristic of the
personalities and decision-making process. This I have examined in
detail in last year’s piece Egypt’s long walk to despotism that
attempts to make sense of the relationship between Egypt’s political
order and the stream of abusurdies we have witnessed over the past few
years.

Yet both Egypt and Russia share elements of kakistocracy and
kleptocracy. There is no mutual exclusivness and clear demarcation lines
in this debate.

Yet the flipside of not engaging with kakistocracy has left the word
to the mindless circulation of memes and right wing shrills like Glenn
Beck who sporadically employ it (and mispronounce it)
to attack the Obama administration. Love him or hate him, Obama and his
administration is far from anything resembling a kakistocracy. Bad
decisions are not always a sign of kakistocracy.

Some might argue kakistocracy is a form of tautology, that stupidity
can be rife through established democracies and dictatorships without
needing to resort to a special word, or that behaviour is not enough to
explain governance. I would argue otherwise: words matter, as a more
sophisticated approach in the use of kakistocracy, even if endowed with
new meanings, can bring in a sharper conceptual understanding of
incompetence, help provoke thought and new approaches to the relations
of power.

Therefore, kakistocracy will not only capture rule by the “stupid”
and the “worst,” but how they push human relationships, that form the
controlling governmental machinery, into a degenerative state. The term
will be more receptive to seeing a movement of ideas from psychology and
sociology into the political science and international relations field.
It will provide an organising concept to converse with its established
kinfolk in the form of anti-intellectualism, mediocracy and nepotism.

To my knowledge, we are not even at the stage of seeing conferences
on the dynamics of political stupidity, nor understanding the
accumulative processes over the years that have brought about a large
number of kakistocracies and stupidity as the standard bearer across
much of the world.

Either kakistocracy gets used and thoroughly examined or a Trump presidency will force us to do so.

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